dock << doc, duck

The verb “dock,” meaning to lop off/curtail/withhold, has deep Teutonic roots. Chaucer and Wycliffe both employed it. The word has seen a steady decline, however, over the last century. Where it still occurs, it seems to restrict itself to actions taken on (1) animal tails or (2) earned wages. One suspects that if there were not two objects on which it acted, the verb “dock” might already have slipped into the oblivion of idiomatic opacity.

“Dock” is already near enough to semantic darkness to generate spontaneous substitutions. A popular one is “doc.” On thousands of web pages we hear about “doc the pay” and “doc the tail.” This is probably just a misspelling, especially since “doc,” the nickname for “doctor,” is a noun, not a verb – though one could imagine the speaker thinking about verbalized surgeons doing some serious trimming of their patient’s limbs and lucre.

A less common substitution, but a more believable eggcorn, is the replacement of “dock” by “duck.” “To duck” is to bend/immerse/escape. The employer who docks an employee’s pay ducks his/her contracted responsibility.

European media review site: “That is, if you want to duck my pay by 100 euros, you pay me 100 euros a month in shares of the company. ”

Blog from Oman: “If their till doesn’t balance and it gets ducked out of their pay then they better get better at their jobs because one day the supermarket’s management will change and they’ll stop being so lenient with them.”

Soap opera synopsis: “Julian replies that he does not like to come to this side of the track but he was thinking about Pilar and how they would have to duck her pay on the days that she will not come to work but go to see her son in prison.”